Worried by Taylor Swift’s Jet Emissions?
Let Me Tell You about the Pentagon…
Win Without War
(February 11, 2024) — Climate events like atmospheric rivers, hurricanes, and heatwaves are only becoming more dangerous and deadly — but so far, our plans to address the crisis have had a giant Pentagon-shaped hole.
Quick recap: The Pentagon is the single largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. According to recent estimates, the U.S. war machine pumps out more emissions than 140 other countries. ALL this pollution is exempt from our current climate goals.
Our trajectory is troubling, but a world on fire is not a foregone conclusion — and luckily, we have a crucial opportunity to change course today.
President Biden is putting the final touches on next year’s federal budget now. That means, he can reprioritize people and the planet, and decrease the worst effects of the Pentagon’s pollution with the stroke of a pen.
It’s a damning statement that instead of addressing this threat head-on, the U.S. government is helping to accelerate it.
ACTION: Sign Now if You Agree:
President Biden’s budget needs to cut Pentagon emissions.
The Warnings Are Clear:
To avoid the worst of climate change’s catastrophic effects, the world’s average temperature shouldn’t exceed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of pre-industrial temps. Scientists reported this week that for the past 12 months, we’ve surpassed that crucial threshold. [See CNN report below — EAW]
The problem? While outlets from Forbes to Fox News and more devote column inches to the environmental impact of the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift’s private jet emissions, there is one mega-polluter that rarely makes the headlines: the Pentagon.
It’s time to face the truth that it requires an INCREDIBLE amount of energy to wage war across the globe — and almost all of it is derived from fossil fuels.
Just one jet in the Pentagon’s fleet, the B-52 Stratofortress, consumes about as much fuel in one hour as the average car driver uses in seven years. 76 of those planes will remain in service until at least 2050.
Our addiction to war is fueling the climate crisis, but here’s why we won’t give up: Every single fraction of a degree of planetary warming we avoid matters. If we can cut even a percentage of the Pentagon’s emissions, we can save lives and protect ecosystems.
That’s why we’re speaking out, and we need you to join us. Whether you’re rooting for San Francisco or Kansas City, today you can help ensure we all win a cleaner, healthier future. Please take 30 seconds to act now. Add your name to tell the president to make these reductions a reality.
Thank you for working for peace,
Sam, Shayna, Faith, and the Win Without War team
The World Just Passed a Critical Climate
Limit Scientists Have Warned About
Angela Dewan / CNN
(February 8, 2024) — Global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 12 months for the first time on record, new data shows, breaching a critical threshold that, if it continues, will push the limits of life on Earth to adapt.
The past year was 1.52 degrees hotter on average than temperatures before industrialization, according to data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate and weather monitoring service. That 12-month average was boosted by the hottest January on record, which was 1.66 degrees warmer than the average January temperature in pre-industrial times.
Keeping global warming below 2 degrees, but preferably 1.5, was the centerpiece goal of the Paris Agreement, which most of the world’s nations signed onto in 2015.
Scientists are more concerned with _multi-year warming above these thresholds, but the 12-month record shows the world is fast approaching the Paris Agreement’s limits.
Matt Patterson, a postdoctoral research assistant in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, said the record was a “significant milestone,” but didn’t mean the Paris Agreement had failed.
“However, exceeding 1.5C in one year underlines the rapidly shrinking window of time humanity has to make deep emissions cuts and avoid dangerous climate change.”
Heat records on land and sea have tumbled over the past year. The last eight months in a row have been the hottest such months on record, Copernicus said, while 2023 was the hottest calendar year.
The average global sea surface temperature for January was also the hottest on record for that month by a large margin: 0.26 degrees warmer than the previous record, set in 2016.
“2024 starts with another record-breaking month – not only is it the warmest January on record but we have also just experienced a 12-month period of more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial reference period,” Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said in a statement. “Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures increasing.”
The climate crisis is driven primarily from humans burning coal, oil and gas for energy. El Niño, a natural climate pattern that originates in the Pacific Ocean, has also boosted temperatures in much of the world in recent months.
Extreme weather events already made more frequent and severe by long-term global warming are now being supercharged by El Niño, scientists say. The combination of the two has proved particularly destructive.
More than 160 wildfires that spread over an area of Chile this week have killed more than 120 people and reduced entire neighborhoods to ashes, making them the deadliest blazes in the country’s recent history.
The twin threat also supercharged the California storms this week, scientists said, enhancing rainfall and boosting the storm’s destructive power.
